


The Favourite

by MercySewerPyro



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Medical Abuse, Medical Experimentation, Minor Character Death, POV Second Person, This is quite dark, Violence, but it doesn't go super into detail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 07:02:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23467327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercySewerPyro/pseuds/MercySewerPyro
Summary: Your designation is CC-2216. You're a clone commander, working to improve the weapons of an army you've never even met.And you area monsterMaster's favourite.(Posted for Norcumi's & Dogmatix's 'Star Fever' event!)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 103





	The Favourite

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Restricted Work] by [dogmatix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogmatix/pseuds/dogmatix), [norcumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/norcumi/pseuds/norcumi). Log in to view. 



> Disclaimer: I have NEVER watched Stargate, even though I really really should. I just love A Star To Steer By and this idea really took me and ran.

Your designation is CC-2166.

But Master only calls you that when he’s in a good mood. At any other time, you’re just ‘commander’, or ‘clone’. And these days he is so rarely in a good mood.

While other troopers host Jedi, form an army, you alone are special (you know this because Master has told you so): you work alone, crafting the newest weapons for an army you’ve never even seen. You’re a geneticist, and your art is stitching together the right traits - the _desirable_ traits - for the next generation. You work on accelerating the cloning process, doing your best to not sacrifice quality. You don’t even need to be assigned troopers to be a commander; by this point, you’ve already been through a generation or two of your own.

The weapons are living.

You try not to think of the screams, of theirs or the originals. Master doesn’t like it when you show weakness.

This has been your life since even before you remember. He _chose_ you, because you’re smarter, you think of things nobody else can. Because you’re more than a warrior. Because you can do things others can’t.

(It doesn’t cross your mind that your first memory was swallowing, and a brief, sharp pain at the back of your neck. You were barely even decanted.)

You’ve never seen another trooper, not one of the ‘original’ model, except for the few deposited here, half-dead and merely clinging to life. The ones Master assures you are going to die regardless. They _do,_ if you don’t do anything, if you shy away from your purpose. They scream, they _hate you_ for your work, but if they live just a little bit longer-

Maybe it’ll be worth it.

Maybe Master will be pleased with you.

(You try not to think of the fact that the unaltered ones only seem to die when Master knows of them. You hide a few anyway.)

He’s not pleased with you often, these days. When you were younger, it was easier; he would praise you for the smallest things, the littlest progress. He called you ‘acolyte’ and said you were _different._ He taught you how to use your abilities. Now, only great strides make him happy. Loyalty tweaks. A code, written into a biological chip. _Good soldiers follow orders_.

And you’re a good soldier. You’re a good commander.

The first years were easy. All you had to work on were sea mice, and that was all. There was no one with your face but not your glasses, no fear and hate and pain, thick enough it made you ill. Even when Master asked you to kill one, to break its neck, it wasn’t as bad. You did your best, and tried to forget about it. It was just a mouse. You made it quick, and you made it as painless as you could. The praise he gave in return didn’t hurt your heart.

The first time they brought in a half-dead trooper, so obviously not going to make it, and he had asked you the same, you’d cried.

He’d hit you.

You broke the trooper’s neck.

For the first time, the praise didn’t make you feel better. Instead it sat in your stomach like a rock, harsh and rough and uncomfortable. You ended up throwing up, when Master wasn’t around to berate you for it.

He asked you to do it again, in the end. This one barely injured, alive and aware and seething with rage. He'd bit you, and you nearly hadn't gone through with it. But you remembered the sharp pain of your Master hitting you, and you did your best to make it quick. Your hands couldn't stop shaking, but Master was so _proud_ of you.

After that it got easier. These days the screams no longer affect you as much as they once did. Killing is easy to block out, to consider something that just has to be done; you’ve already stained your hands with one trooper’s blood, what are a couple more dead to hands now so practiced?

(You hate it. But you can’t let Master see that.)

The troopers call you brother sometimes, when they beg for their lives. You don’t know how to respond to that. You’ve never been their brother. You don’t have any siblings- You are special, and you are alone. Isn’t that what Master’s always told you?

But sometimes, when Master isn’t around, you reach out in the way he taught you, and do something he’d hate. You ease these troopers’ pain, pushing them to a slumber so deep they don’t feel a thing. You always cry about it after, afraid of what he’d think, but that never stops you from doing it. Besides, you’ve gotten very good at shielding yourself from his prying, without looking like you’re doing it.

Recently, Master has been away longer and longer, and his temper is always shorter and shorter when he returns. You’ve gotten used to treating your own lightning burns, to devouring medical knowledge just as fast as you once devoured material on genetics, trying your best to ease your wounds when he’s not around to hurt you more.

You know Master’s just… Stressed. Things aren’t going well for him, you think. Something in his plans is going wrong.

It doesn’t stop you from hiding the fact you sometimes try to treat your so-called siblings’ wounds too. That you feel like you need to do something, even as you know Master would hurt you and them for you even trying.

(You don’t get why they keep comparing you to a Jedi in those times. Why they say your healing is more than physical.)

This time, Master’s been away longer than ever. You worry, even as you let a trooper go here and there. They’re treated, they’re safe- If they’re no longer so close to death’s door, then you no longer have jurisdiction over them. At least, that’s what you reason to yourself. Even though you know your Master wouldn’t see it like that.

Your own troopers, the ones you bred, are too quiet, too obedient, and sometimes you wish they would just talk to you. But Master says good soldiers don’t need to talk, and good soldiers don’t need that chip turned off. Good soldiers just need to follow orders. You're a good soldier. But in that oppressive silence, sometimes you wonder if you’re the only clone in the entire facility with a soul.

(You know better. You tore your own soul to pieces a long time ago. You don’t stop dreaming of that first trooper, and his broken neck.)

Master should come back any day now, you think. It’s almost desperate, now- Your senses don’t catch any signs of life that you don’t already know about, the monsters (the monsters you created, not the monster you are) below the ground floor, the obedient, mindless 66th always by your side.

Maybe Master will come back, and he’ll praise you for keeping everything in such good order. You hope he will. You _pray_ he will.

Maybe- Maybe he’ll teach you more. Maybe he’ll tell you that you did a good job.

But days later, _weeks_ later, with food running low, it’s not your Master who comes home. It’s the Jedi, led by troopers you’ve let go free.

And by the way they cut through the defences, by the way they call you _Sith_ for what they find (until the reality of what has been done to _you_ crashes down on them), you realize the truth- Or, more accurately, have that box you shoved within yourself opened, and you are forced to confront what you always knew.

Master is never coming home. You _are_ a monster, after all. No clone trooper, no matter how special, can use the Force alone.

And ‘you’ is a word both singular and plural.

**Author's Note:**

> What happens when you put a baby Jedi in a baby clone?
> 
> Trauma, as it turns out.


End file.
